Traditional Anglicans Seek Return to Rome

The increasing divisions in the Anglican communion over the ordination of women and the consecration of practicing homosexuals as bishops has come to a head. According to numerous reports, the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), a group which represents 400,000 Anglicans in 40 countries worldwide, has sent a letter to the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, requesting "full, corporate, and sacramental union" with the Catholic Church.

According to the B.C. Catholic (the official newspaper of the Catholic archdiocese of Vancouver, British Columbia):

The TAC college of bishops met in a plenary assembly the first week of October in Portsmouth, England, where the 30 or so bishops and vicars general who are in charge of dioceses presently without bishops "unanimously agreed" to the text of a letter that was delivered to Rome the following week.

If Rome accepts the TAC into full communion, it would represent the largest reunion of separated Christians with the Catholic Church in several centuries. While the Church allows an Anglican-use liturgy and has permitted married Anglican priests, on a case-by-case basis, to become Catholic priests after their conversion, a mass reunion of this size would almost certainly lead to the creation of a separate Anglican-use rite, with its own ecclesiastical structure, liturgy, and married priesthood, similar to that of Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. Rumors earlier this year indicated that Pope Benedict XVI is considering granting the Anglican-use liturgy a status similar to that of the Traditional Latin Mass, allowing any priest to use it.

The decision "to approach Rome as a community" rather than to convert individually is a deliberate affirmation of the importance of ecclesiastical community, according to TAC Primate Archbishop John Hepworth of Australia. In an interview with Canada's Salt and Light Television in 2006 (quoted by the B.C. Catholic), Archbishop Hepworth explained that:

"The saying of Anglicans is that if you don't have one Pope, everybody is a Pope, because everybody can make up their minds what is infallible."

"What is important, and we are having to learn as a community, is to ask not what we think, but what the Church says, and five centuries of bad habits are going to die hard, but if you ask us if we accept the Magisterium of the Church, yes, and we all have the Catechism of the Catholic Church on our desks and many of us preach from it."

On Holy Thursday, at the Last Supper, Christ prayed that all who followed Him might be one, as He and His Father are one. While 400,000 Anglicans represent only a small percentage of the 60 million worldwide, their reunion would certainly be a step in the direction of fulfilling Christ's desire.